The storied London auction house is where Lee Carmichael hopes to lay her hands on some Art.

Carmichael, a 22-year-old Pampa native, heads to England on Wednesday to study modern and contemporary art and design at Christie's Education, a school run by the auction company.

"It's a real hands-on course," Carmichael said. "They teach you all about the art world, what goes on with buying, how to price things."

Carmichael, who graduated in August with a bachelor's degree in art from the University of Mississippi, said she will take a one-year diploma course to hone her art-business skills.

"I definitely want to be some sort of art dealer and work in a gallery or museum - in a big city," she said. "I'm trying to get out (of Pampa) forever."

While the course Carmichael will take is academically challenging, much of her studies won't be traditional classroom work, she said.

"We have to go to a lot of galleries around town - lots of (art) shows," Carmichael explained. "Our big project over there is to go to independent shows and sort of discover artists and help them put on a show."

Christie's gives the students a budget to mount a show of their "found" artist's work at the Tate Modern art museum in London.

Carmichael said she learned about the Christie's program from a graduate, Emily Quinn, who attended a course in 1999. Quinn, who now lives in Washington, D.C., grew up in Pampa and Amarillo and got a degree in art history from Baylor University at Waco.

Attending Christie's auctions was an integral part of the training, she said.

"The auctions were exciting. It was interesting to see who was going to buy what and how much the pieces were going to go for," Quinn said. "It definitely put a different perspective on art."

The school also has an international flavor, with students coming from many parts of Europe and places like Japan, Quinn said.

One of the high points of her year was sneaking into an exclusive pre-auction party and rubbing shoulder with some of the well-known names in the contemporary art world, she said.

After her course at Christie's, Quinn got hired at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where she worked four years until recently when she took a job outside the art world. She said she thinks the Christie's cachet helped her snag the museum position.